for here the reader is required, not for any special advantage to
himself, but _simply to save Mr Newman trouble_, to place the accent on
the insignificant word _wert_, where it has _no business whatever_’.
Thus to the flaw which Mr Arnold admits nine times in thirteen pattern
lines, he shows no mercy in me, who have toiled through fifteen
thousand. Besides, on _wert_ we are free at pleasure to place or not to
place the accent; but in Mr Arnold’s _Bétween_, _Tó a_, etc., it is
impossible or offensive.
To avoid a needlessly personal argument, I enlarge on the general
question of hexameters. Others, scholars of repute, have given example
and authority to English hexameters. As matter of curiosity, as erudite
sport, such experiments may have their value. I do not mean to express
indiscriminate disapproval, much less contempt. I have myself privately
tried the same in Alcaics; and find the chief objection to be, not that
the task is impossible, but that to execute it _well_ is too difficult
for a language like ours, overladen with consonants, and abounding with
syllables neither distinctly long nor distinctly short, but of every
intermediate length. Singing to a tune was essential to keep even Greek
or Roman poetry to true _time_; to the English language it is of tenfold
necessity. But if _time_ is abandoned (as in fact it always is), and the
prose accent has to do duty for the ictus metricus, the moral genius of
the metre is fundamentally subverted. What previously was steady
duplicate time (‘march-time’, as Professor Blackie calls it) vacillates
between duplicate and triplicate. With Homer, a dactyl had nothing in it
_more tripping_ than a spondee: a crotchet followed by two quavers
belongs to as grave an anthem as two crotchets. But Mr Arnold himself
(p. 55) calls the introduction of anapæsts by Dr Maginn into our ballad
measure, ‘a detestable dance’: as in:
And scarcely hád shĕ bĕgún to wash,
Ere shé wăs ăwáre ŏf thĕ grisly gash.
I will not assert that this is everywhere improper in the Odyssey; but
no part of the Iliad occurs to me in which it is proper, and I have
totally excluded it in my own practice. I notice it but once in Mr
Gladstone’s specimens, and it certainly offends my taste as out of
harmony with the gravity of the rest, viz.
My ships shall bound ĭn thĕ morning’s light.
In Shakspeare we have _i’th’_ and _o’th’_ for monosyllables, but (so
scrupulous am I in the midst of my ‘atrocities’) I never dream of such a
liberty myself, much less of avowed ‘anapæsts’. So far do I go in the
opposite direction, as to prefer to make such words as _Danai_,
_victory_ three syllables, which even Mr Gladstone and Pope accept as
dissyllabic. Some reviewers have called my metre _lege solutum_; which
is as ridiculous a mistake as Horace made concerning Pindar. That, in
passing. But surely Mr Arnold’s severe blow at Dr Maginn rebounds with
double force upon himself.
To Péleus whý dĭd wĕ gíve you?—
Hécŭbă’s griéf nor Príăm my fáther’s—
Thoúsănds ŏf sórrows—
cannot be a _less_ detestable jig than that of Dr Maginn. And this
objection holds against every accentual hexameter, even to those of
Longfellow or Lockhart, if applied to grand poetry. For bombast, in a
wild whimsical poem, Mr Clough has proved it to be highly appropriate;
and I think, the more ‘rollicking’ is Mr Clough (if only I understand
the word) the more successful his metre. Mr Arnold himself _feels_ what
I say against ‘dactyls’, for on this very ground he advises largely
superseding them by spondees; and since what he calls a spondee is any
pair of syllables of which the former is accentuable, his precept
amounts to this, that the hexameter be converted into a line of six
accentual trochees, with free liberty left of diversifying it, in any
foot except the last, by Dr Maginn’s ‘detestable dance’. What more
severe condemnation of the metre is imaginable than this mere
description gives? ‘Six trochees’ seems to me the worst possible
foundation for an English metre. I cannot imagine that Mr Arnold will
give the slightest weight to this, as a judgment from me; but I do
advise him to search in Samson Agonistes, Thalaba, Kehama, and Shelley’s
works, for the phenomenon.
I have elsewhere insisted, but I here repeat, that for a long poem a
trochaic beginning of the verse is most unnatural and vexatious in
English, because so large a number of our sentences begin with
unaccented syllables, and the vigour of a trochaic line eminently
depends on the purity of its initial trochee. Mr Arnold’s feeble
trochees already quoted (from _Bétween_ to _Tó a_) are all the fatal
result of defying the tendencies of our language.
If by a happy combination any scholar could compose fifty _such_ English
hexameters, as would convey a living likeness of the Virgilian metre, I
should applaud it as valuable for initiating schoolboys into that metre:
but there its utility would end. The method could not be profitably used
for translating Homer or Virgil, plainly because it is impossible to say
for whose service such a translation would be executed. Those who can
read the original will never care to read _through_ any translation; and
the unlearned look on all, even the best hexameters, whether from
Southey, Lockhart or Longfellow, as odd and disagreeable prose. Mr
Arnold deprecates appeal to popular taste: well he may! yet if the
unlearned are to be our audience, we cannot defy them. I myself, before
venturing to print, sought to ascertain how unlearned women and children
would accept my verses. I could boast how children and half-educated
women have extolled them; how greedily a working man has inquired for
them, without knowing who was the translator; but I well know that this
is quite insufficient to establish the merits of a translation. It is
nevertheless _one_ point. ‘Homer is popular’, is one of the very few
matters of fact in this controversy on which Mr Arnold and I are agreed.
‘English hexameters are not popular’, is a truth so obvious, that I do
not yet believe he will deny it. Therefore, ‘Hexameters are not the
metre for translating Homer’. Q. E. D.
I cannot but think that the very respectable scholars who pertinaciously
adhere to the notion that English hexameters have something ‘epical’ in
them, have no vivid _feeling_ of the difference between Accent and
Quantity: and this is the less wonderful, since so very few persons have
ever actually _heard_ quantitative verse. I have; by listening to
Hungarian poems, read to me by my friend Mr Francis Pulszky, a native
Magyar. He had not finished a single page, before I complained gravely
of the monotony. He replied: ‘So do _we_ complain of it’: and then
showed me, by turning the pages, that the poet cut the knot which he
could not untie, by frequent changes of his metre. Whether it was a
change of mere length, as from Iambic senarian to Iambic dimeter; or
implied a fundamental change of time, as in music from _common_ to
_minuet_ time; I cannot say. But, to my ear, nothing but a tune can ever
save a quantitative metre from hideous monotony. It is like strumming a
piece of very simple music on a single note. Nor only so; but the most
beautiful of anthems, after it has been repeated a hundred times on a
hundred successive verses, begins to pall on the ear. How much more
would an entire book of Homer, if chanted at one sitting! I have the
conviction, though I will not undertake to impart it to another, that if
the living Homer could sing his lines to us, they would at first move in
us the same pleasing interest as an elegant and simple melody from an
African of the Gold Coast; but that, after hearing twenty lines, we
should complain of meagreness, sameness, and _loss of moral expression_;
and should judge the style to be _as_ inferior to our own oratorical
metres, as the music of Pindar to our third-rate modern music. But if
the poet, at our request, instead of singing the verses, read or spoke
them, then from the loss of well-marked time and the ascendency
reassumed by the prose-accent, we should be as helplessly unable to
_hear_ any metre in them, as are the modern Greeks.
I expect that Mr Arnold will reply to this, that he _reads_ and does not
_sing_ Homer, and yet he finds his verses to be melodious and not
monotonous. To this, I retort, that he begins by wilfully pronouncing
Greek falsely, according to the laws of _Latin_ accent, and artificially
assimilating the Homeric to the Virgilian line. Virgil has compromised
between the ictus metricus and the prose accent, by exacting that the
two coincide in the two last feet and generally forbidding it in the
second and third foot. What is called the ‘feminine cæsura’ gives (in
the Latin language) coincidence on the third foot. Our extreme
familiarity with these laws of compromise enables us to anticipate
recurring sounds and satisfies our ear. But the Greek prose accent, by
reason of oxytons and paroxytons, and accent on the ante-penultima in
spite of a long penultima, totally resists all such compromise; and
proves that particular form of melody, which our scholars enjoy in
Homer, to be an unhistoric imitation of Virgil.
I am aware, there is a bold theory, whispered if not published, that,—so
out-and-out _Æolian_ was Homer,—his laws of accent must have been almost
Latin. According to this, Erasmus, following the track of Virgil
blindly, has taught us to pronounce Euripides and Plato ridiculously
ill, but Homer, with an accuracy of accent which puts Aristarchus to
shame. This is no place for discussing so difficult a question. Suffice
it to say, _first_, that Mr Arnold cannot take refuge in such a theory,
since he does not admit that Homer was antiquated to Euripides; _next_,
that admitting the theory to him, still the loss of the Digamma destroys
to him the true rhythm of Homer. I shall recur to both questions below.
I here add, that our English pronunciation even of Virgil often so ruins
Virgil’s own _quantities_, that there is something either of delusion or
of pedantry in our scholars’ self-complacency in the rhythm which they
elicit.
I think it fortunate for Mr Arnold, that he had _not_ ‘courage to
translate Homer’; for he must have failed to make it acceptable to the
unlearned. But if the public ear prefers ballad metres, still (Mr Arnold
assumes) ‘the scholar’ is with him in this whole controversy.
Nevertheless it gradually comes out that neither is this the case, but
he himself is in the minority. P. 110, he writes: ‘When one observes the
boistering, rollicking way in which Homer’s English admirers—even men of
genius, like the late Professor Wilson—love to talk of Homer and his
poetry, one cannot help feeling that there is no very deep community of
nature between them and the object of their enthusiasm.’ It does not
occur to Mr Arnold that the defect of perception lies with himself, and
that Homer has more sides than he has discovered. He deplores that Dr
Maginn, and others whom he names, err with me, in believing that our
ballad-style is the nearest approximation to that of Homer; and avows
that ‘_it is time to say plainly_’ (p. 46) that Homer is not of the
ballad-type. So in p. 45, ‘—this _popular_, but, _it is time to say_,
this erroneous analogy’ between the ballad and Homer. Since it is
reserved for Mr Arnold to turn the tide of opinion; since it is a task
not yet achieved, but remains to be achieved by his authoritative
enunciation; he confesses that hitherto I have with me the suffrage of
scholars. With this confession, a little more diffidence would be
becoming, if diffidence were possible to the fanaticism with which he
idolises hexameters. P. 88, he says: ‘The hexameter has a natural
dignity, which repels both the jaunty style and the jog-trot style,
etc.... _The translator who uses it cannot too religiously follow the_
INSPIRATION OF HIS METRE’ etc. Inspiration from a metre which has no
recognised type? from a metre which the _heart_ and _soul_ of the nation
ignores? I believe, if the metre can inspire anything, it is to frolic
and gambol with Mr Clough. Mr Arnold’s English hexameter cannot be a
higher inspiration to him, than the true hexameter was to a Greek: yet
that metre inspired strains of totally different essential genius and
merit.
But I claim Mr Arnold himself as confessing that our ballad _metre_ is
epical, when he says that Scott is ‘_bastard_-epic’. I do not admit that
his quotations from Scott are all Scott’s best, nor anything like it;
but if they were, it would only prove something against Scott’s genius
or talent, nothing about his metre. The Κύπρια ἔπη or Ἰλίου πέρσις were
probably very inferior to the Iliad; but no one would on that account
call them or the Frogs and Mice bastard-epic. No one would call a bad
tale of Dryden or of Crabbe bastard-epic. The application of the word to
Scott virtually concedes what I assert. Mr Arnold also calls Macaulay’s
ballads ‘pinchbeck’; but a man needs to produce something very noble
himself, before he can afford thus to sneer at Macaulay’s ‘Lars
Porsena’.
Before I enter on my own ‘metrical exploits’, I must get rid of a
disagreeable topic. Mr Arnold’s repugnance to them has led him into
forms of attack, which I do not know how to characterize. I shall state
my complaints as concisely as I can, and so leave them.
1. I do not seek for any similarity of _sound_ in an English accentual
metre to that of a Greek quantitative metre; besides that Homer writes
in a highly vocalized tongue, while ours is overfilled with consonants.
I have disowned this notion of similar rhythm in the strongest terms (p.
xvii of my Preface), expressly because some critics had imputed this aim
to me in the case of Horace. I summed up: ‘It is not audible sameness of
metre, but a likeness of moral genius which is to be aimed at’. I
contrast the audible to the moral. Mr Arnold suppresses this contrast,
and writes as follows, p. 34. Mr Newman tells us that he has found a
metre like in moral genius to Homer’s. His judge has still the same
answer: reproduce THEN _on our ear_ something of ‘the effect produced by
the _movement_ of Homer’. He recurs to the same fallacy in p. 57. ‘For
whose EAR do those two _rhythms_ produce impressions of (_to use Mr
Newman’s own words_) “similar moral genius”’? His reader will naturally
suppose that ‘like in moral genius’ is with me an eccentric phrase for
‘like in musical cadence’. The only likeness to the ear which I have
admitted, is, that the one and the other are primitively made _for
music_. That, Mr Arnold knows, is a matter of fact, whether a ballad be
well or ill written. If he pleases, he may hold the rhythm of our metre
to be necessarily inferior to Homer’s and to his own; but when I fully
explained in my preface what were my tests of ‘like moral genius’, I
cannot understand his suppressing them, and perverting the sense of my
words.
2. In p. 52, Mr Arnold quotes Chapman’s translation of ἆ δείλω, ‘Poor
wretched _beasts_’ (of Achilles’ horses), on which he comments severely.
He does _not_ quote me. Yet in p. 100, after exhibiting Cowper’s
translation of the same passage, he adds: ‘There is no want of dignity
here, as in the versions of Chapman and of _Mr Newman, which I have
already quoted_’. Thus he leads the reader to believe that I have the
same phrase as Chapman! In fact, my translation is:
Ha! why on Peleus, mortal prince,
Bestowed we _you_, unhappy!
If he had done me the justice of quoting, it is possible that some
readers would not have thought my rendering intrinsically ‘wanting in
dignity’, or less noble than Mr Arnold’s own, which is:
Ah! unhappy pair! to Peleus[36] why did we give you,
To a mortal?
In p. 52, he with very gratuitous insult remarks, that ‘Poor wretched
beasts’ is a little over-familiar; but this is no objection to it for
the ballad-manner[37]: _it is good enough_ ... _for Mr Newman’s Iliad_,
... etc.’ Yet I myself have _not_ thought it good enough for my Iliad.
3. In p. 107, Mr Arnold gives his own translation of the discourse
between Achilles and his horse; and prefaces it with the words, ‘I will
take the passage in which both Chapman and Mr Newman _have already so
much excited our astonishment_’. But he did not quote my translation of
the noble part of the passage, consisting of 19 lines; he has merely
quoted[38] the tail of it, 5 lines; which are altogether inferior. Of
this a sufficient indication is, that Mr Gladstone has translated the 19
and omitted the 5. I shall below give my translation parallel to Mr
Gladstone’s. The curious reader may compare it with Mr Arnold’s, if he
choose.
4. In p. 102, Mr Arnold quotes from Chapman as a translation of ὅταν
ποτ’ ὀλώλῃ Ιλιος ἱρὴ,
‘When sacred Troy shall _shed her tow’rs for tears of overthrow_’;
and adds: ‘What Mr Newman’s manner of rendering would be, you can by
this time sufficiently imagine for yourselves’. _Would be!_ Why does he
set his readers to ‘imagine’, when in fewer words he could tell them
what my version _is_? It stands thus: